


You can almost get used to dying

by Melodic



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, idk if that counts as an actual character death, its not actually graphic and they come back to life every time so like
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-15
Updated: 2017-11-12
Packaged: 2019-01-17 12:41:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12366009
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Melodic/pseuds/Melodic
Summary: The crew of the Starblaster never quite gets used to death, but they do get used to coming back. How do you adjust to immortality? Can you grieve someone you know will come back next year? How can you not, when the body's lying right in front of you?





	1. to do a little good

You can almost get used to dying.

Magnus got used to it first, as he always stayed behind to fight the Hunger. Even if they hadn't found the Light this time, and they all knew with certainty that no one on this world would live, he always tried to give the people there a few more precious seconds. Eventually Davenport stopped urging him to get on the ship, and they had no qualms about taking off without him; they all knew Magnus would be back, and they did not question his insistence on fighting a foregone conclusion. They understood why he did it, even if they wished their friend had a better sense of self-preservation. 

So Magnus died over and over and over again, and as the others sped away the bond engine would glow and all it's little threads would weave together as if by the hand of Istus herself and remake him, exactly like the day they left, black eye and all. 

The first time it happens it's startling. One minute you're hacking and slashing against some horrible darkness and then you slip up and finally realize that there's too many and one at a time they start ripping and tearing at every piece of you and then you're _dead_ and suddenly everything is very bright and you're standing right back on the Starblaster. He was disoriented, his head still in the fight, and his ax was an inch away from Taako's throat when he finally realized where he was. Nobody else knew what to do that first time either, the workings of the bond engine still mostly a mystery, and there was a moment of tense and dumbfounded silence as they all simply stared at each other. Magnus had dropped his ax and his eyes darted around, a little scared but mostly confused and breathing heavily as the adrenaline from the battle hadn't left him yet. Davenport was focused on driving the ship but watching carefully out of the corner of his eye, trying to remember if this part of the bond engines functions had been in the manual. 

It was Lucretia who broke the silence, when she softly asked if Magnus would like a cup of tea, and something for his eye. He reached up to touch it as if just realizing it was injured as she carefully guided him into the kitchen and put on the kettle for some oolong. 

He adjusted a little faster every time, until the day he came out swinging, walking out of the light, looked around, blinked, and then laughed heartily. By then they knew to be ready with something frozen to put on his eye and warm mug. The eye was the only thing he complained about; he didn't seem to mind death at all. He figured that if he was always going to live then there was no reason not to throw himself into every fight, to rush in, to never hesitate, especially if he could do a little good with his strange new immortality. 

Years later, after forgetting all of this, after Julia and everything else, Magnus Burnsides would find himself easily slipping into the role of a man searching for something to die for. He embraced it comfortably; as long as his death would do a little good.


	2. experimentation

The second person to get used to dying was, strangely enough, Barry. The first time someone came back to life they all had questions they were unsure how to ask; _What does it feel like to die? To come back? How does it work?_ But they were far more burning questions to Barry than to anyone else. Just about everyone in every level of IPRE was aware of Barry Bluejeans' quiet and personal fascination with necromancy, but he was a good enough scientist that as long as he maintained even the barest shred of plausible deniability they let it slide. Lots of perfectly respectable wizards can cast Blight and Enervation; if a man wants to animate the dead on his own personal time that was really none of their concern. Nobody can actually prove what kind of flesh that journal was bound in. Here, someone had come back, not undead but truly alive again, right before them! Such a discovery could not go un-investigated. 

Magnus's answers were not quite as detailed as he'd prefer, and being an awkward man he feared coming off as prying. He knew no matter how much information he recorded the experiences would be difficult to quantifiably record in any true sense. So like so very many mad scientists before him he put aside issues of blind studies and bias and ethics and succumbed to the temptation to become his own test subject. 

The next time the Hunger came, he did not run back to the ship. Barry Bluejeans had never been a brave man, but he held on, and stayed behind with Magnus and used every spell slot he had destroying horrible creature after horrible creature, right up until a tentacle got him straight through the chest. The pain was the screaming kind that demanded all of your attention so you have to close your eyes and bite your tongue because you can't process anything besides how much it hurts, and then he felt nothing at all.

And then abruptly there was light, and he looked around the ship in a daze. They helped him up and as he realized what had happened he stood up straighter and became a little frantic. "Paper! I need paper!" Though confused they heeded his urgency and gave him something to write with and he recorded the experience in the very clearest way he could.

_1) Dying hurts like a motherfucker._

For the next few years he spent much time experimenting with and examining the parameters of their strange resurrection. He confirmed via his own height, weight, hair length, and other features what they already suspected, that they returned to the exact physical state they were in the day the ship had launched. He continued to measure such things as a point of recordkeeping, just as he recorded his method of death and continued to look for any other physical or psychological changes that may appear. He and Magnus developed a strange type of rapport. Though Magnus threw himself into battle with a rather worrying disregard for his own safety and Barry approached it more as a matter of scientific discovery, in the end it's very hard to die next to someone and not become friends afterwards. 

_2)Subjects become more comfortable adjusting to resurrection each repitition._   
_2a) Dying itself, however, sucks every single time._


	3. an inconvenience

The first time Lup saw a friend die with her own eyes it was Lucretia and she almost cried. The fifth time it was Magnus and she felt an empty echo of disappointment that she wouldn't be able to double dare him to fight any more mountain lions and laugh her ass off when he actually did it till, like, candlenights. What a shame. She was a little disconcerted by her own lack of reaction but that's just how things were now, she guessed. They all had to adapt.

Lup did not like dying. Nobody did. She was not, however, afraid of it. 

Lup would avoid death to the best of her ability, but she wouldn't mind dying as long as she was doing what she believed in, and Lup was the kind of woman who by nature believed in things that demanded challenge and adventure and risk and the occasional explosion. That was why she had chosen evocation, after all. She loved sparks at the edge of her fingertips and the power in the confident grip of her wand. Yet her tendency towards the fast and loud and wild and on-fire meant that no matter how smart or careful she was it was inevitable that over the course of 100 years she would meet a few things she couldn't blast her way out of. It did not help that the rare years her brother died first she would end up a little more reckless than usual.

The first time it happened was almost embarrassingly unglamourous; she didn't die fighting the hunger but some other monsters entirely. The denizens of this world had refused to give them the Light, and would not believe them when they spoke of the Hunger, so they had resorted to stealing it, and were subsequently ambushed by an armed and vengeful group of locals who wanted it back. Lup had received a crossbow bolt to the torso and fell to the ground, spitting up blood as breathing got harder. Her last thoughts were a panic-stricken recollection of what she knew about first aid, _whatever you do, don't pull it out, Merle will fix it, medicine is a wisdom roll, right? god dammit, just-_ and then nothing. Then, light.

The first one to rush to her was Taako, who nearly tackled her in an embrace, which seemed strange until she remembered she'd probably been gone for months on their end. He hovered around and wouldn't let her out of his sight for the first week, eyeing her suspiciously as if afraid she was going to disappear again any second and for a while acted like she was some fragile thing made of spun glass, looking nervous if she took even the smallest step into danger and becoming indignant when she ignored him. Lup found it annoying and endearing at the same time and decided not to point it out. She idly wondered if he had been the one who had to find her, but thought it best not to ask. 

Lup died a few more times and found it more like an inconvenience than anything else. A cheat code to just skip to the next year. Sometimes she would be injured, badly, and think nothing of it until she remembered that if she died the others would have to get through the year by themselves, and honestly where would these chucklefucks be without her? She survived landslides and poison and the Hunger and a particularly vicious pseudopod but occasionally when things sucked and you already knew nothing was permanent there was a serious temptation to just lay down and die. _I'm out. Goodbye. Later darlings. Back soon._ She rarely ever did, though, because Lup was stubborn and liked to win, and if she couldn't win she would make damn sure there was a blaze of glory and as many enemies as possible went down with her. 

Every once in a while she would examine the place where the bolt had pierced her lungs and the pseudopod had melted her hands and find not a mark nor scar nor any evidence at all. Elves age slow so she did not particularly notice each years reset but it was the little things, like accidentally burning off her eyebrows when she cast a fireball too big only to find them grown back so soon, that made her pay attention to how often they were happening. 

But something else was building, every year and every new apocalypse. Lup was getting angry. So many ravaged and decimated worlds, all the people they couldn't save, gone, and they just zoomed away in their little ship and woke up the next day like it was nothing? Fucking incorrigible. Unjustifiable. Untenable. 

They had to do something, anything. They needed real progress. She looked at the bond engine with it's continuous, familiar hum and it's glowing threads and she kept coming back to the same thought. 

_We can use this._

Soon she'd thoroughly gone through all of Lucretia's journals on the subject and began bullying Barry to let him look at the research she knew he was doing, and was spending year after year reading everything she could about the darker arts with a burning determination to find something, if only she knew what she was looking for. One day she looked up from her studies with a wicked grin that Barry always considered a little terrifying because he knew it meant that Lup had an idea.

(Every wizard knows that liches lose themselves, that the transformation makes them distant from their humanity until they become either cruel and evil creatures eternally seeking more power, or simply go mad. Every single wizard who has ever attempted to become a lich is arrogant enough to believe that they are special, that they are unique, the one true genius among mortals who can somehow through their sheer magnificence avoid this fate. They are almost always wrong.) 

Lup announced they were going to become liches. 

(You do, after all, have to be a least a little arrogant to become a wizard in the first place. Nobody learns how to bend reality if they don't believe in some small way that reality should bend to them.)

If there was a joy in magic and power then becoming a lich was all that tenfold; to be _made_ of magic and power and will and nothing else. She could do anything, create anything, destroy anything. It was a power overwhelming and a freedom from physical form. It was death and undeath. You couldn't enjoy it too much, though, because then you'd forget about taste and touch and temperature and there wouldn't be any going back. Now all that happened upon death was that she lost her body for part a year that felt shorter every time; an inconvenience, at worst.

Lup had never been afraid to die but now she didn't have to worry about it because she was already dead, yet there was more firepower in her fingertips than ever before and one could even venture to say that she had never been more alive.


End file.
